Hong Kong King Kong Ping Pong Ding Dong

Once upon a time there was a company called GE Access. Located on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, it was a pretty rare vortex of interesting, creative people and certainly a unique place. (This was actually where Troy and I met, but that is a different story for a different day.) Troy joined the company in the fall of 2000, and worked as a Business Analyst in the IT Department for about five years before deciding to try his hand at a different discipline for awhile. He successfully applied for GE's Six Sigma Quality Program, and began his rotation in early fall 2005.

GE Access had a European branch, headquartered just outside Amsterdam. The two branches of the company operated fairly autonomously, but certain powers-that-be decided that it would be a worthwhile endeavor to start a STIR (Short Term International Rotation -- gotta love those corporate acronyms!) within Quality to promote a better understanding of business processes on both sides of the Atlantic. Our friend John was the first employee to participate in this trial program, so off went he and his wife Sue to Amsterdam for six months (more about them later).

Having whet our appetites with a wee taste of life abroad (Troy when he studied at Oxford, me when I studied in Rome), Troy and I were very attracted to the STIR idea. Plus, it would have been a nice way to finish up Troy's time as a Six Sigma Quality Black Belt (Take that all you creators-of-boring-job-titles!). So by the fall of 2006, Troy was lined up to complete the second STIR when, a couple of weeks shy of a final decision, GE announced that -- surprise! -- it was selling the company and all pending offers were off the table.

Fast forward six months. GE divested itself of the Access business, a company called Avnet acquired it, and, as with all M&As (that's 'mergers and acquisitions' for all you non-corporate types) there were several resulting 'reallocations and redundancies'. Six months of chaos ensued when finally Troy's persistence paid off, and Avnet managed to connect his previous interest in international work with a current job opening in Hong Kong. Though we considered the possibility of a move to Hong Kong remote, we like to be open-minded so Troy went for the interview.

Actually, both Troy and John (remember him, from above?) flew to Hong Kong in July 2007. Interviews were completed, negotiations ensued blah blah blah yada yada yada. John took the job in Hong Kong, and we ended up in Brussels.

Fast forward again, this time to last fall. Troy embarked on a whirlwind worldwide business tour, kicking off a major project with 2 weeks of work each in Phoenix, Düsseldorf, and Hong Kong. Having never been to Asia, and with the added bonus of having friends living there, I decided to accompany him on the trip. And that, my friends, bring us to our story today.

As you might imagine, two weeks in Hong Kong could provide fodder for dozens of blog posts. But, I will try to settle for just a few. We took literally hundreds of photographs, including those in the album linked below. It is a pictorial introduction to Hong Kong and our trip. Going forward, I plan to tackle the story in thematic vignettes. No simple (boring) chronological accounting of our days in the Far East, but rather glimpses into what was a crazy, contrasting, love-it-hate-it kind of adventure. Let's begin.



Hong Kong Photo Album #1 - Click Here